The Right Dose

Sep 20, 2014

RAY: The other night I had a...what is it? A gastrointestinal attack in the middle of the night. It may have had something to do with that double-anchovy, pepperoni pizza I had at 11:00. Or the cheesecake I ate out of the freezer an hour later. But in the middle of the night, I wake up moaning and groaning, clutching my stomach, and I find myself at the medicine chest looking for some medicinal relief. And I pull out the bottle of the stuff, which I recognize by its shape and color. And, lo and behold, I can't read the infinitesimally small print on the bottle. So, I go clutching my stomach. I make my way to the bedroom and find my glasses on the dresser, and I come back and I put them on, and even with my glasses...

TOM: You can't read it.

RAY: I still can't read it. And I'm in agony now.

TOM: You wanted to just swizzle it down. You're going to swizzle it down.

RAY: I'm moaning and groaning. And to make matters even worse, as I'm bent over in pain, my glasses fall off my head and they break in half. I say, "Jeez, that's it. I'm going to just die right here." And yet, a minute later I was tucked in bed, having taken the correct dosage. How did I do it?

TOM: And nobody woke up to help you?

RAY: Nobody. So how did I do it?

Answer:

RAY: How did I do it? Well, I think I mentioned when I broke the glasses that they broke in half, so that I had two.

TOM: Two monocles.

RAY: Exactly. So, I had one lens with a stick attached to it, and another lens with a stick attached to it. And, lo and behold, if you gang the lenses, that is, put one in front of the other, you essentially double the magnification. So I was able to read the bottle, and it said, "Take two of these and stick them down your throat." And, next thing I know, I'm in bed.

TOM: Wow!

RAY: Now, there is another answer to this, which I happen to like better. Let's assume I didn't break my glasses, but in fact, I had small print that I couldn't read. Now, when you try to read something that's too small, when your eyesight is good, what do you do? You bring it closer to your eye, do you not?

TOM: Yeah.

RAY: But then it goes out of focus. And even people with good eyesight can bring something so close that they can no longer read it.

TOM: Right.

RAY: Except that if it's small, I mean, duh. You don't need a genius to tell you that if it's small, you ain't going to move it farther away from you, because you’ve got less of a chance of seeing it. So if you take your index finger and curl it so your fingernail now touches the point where your thumb joins your hand, and in doing so...is that an apt description?

TOM: Yeah. You make a little teeny hole with your index finger.

RAY: You're going to make a little teeny hole. And you could accomplish the same thing by taking a piece of paper and punching a hole in it. If you then look through that hole, you are, in fact, unfuzzying the image. It is like you are bringing it into focus. So that is one other solution to this problem. And I don't know exactly why it works. Anyway, do we have a winner?

TOM: Yeah. We have winners! The winners this week are Pete and Barbara Van Kuren from Conshohocken, Pennsylvania. Congratulations!